Public Intellectual seeks to reveal how Richard Falk became prominent in America and internationally as a public intellectual and citizen pilgrim. It’s written in plain, if not brusque English, devoid of the usual international relations jargon, while filled with trenchant observations and acerbic wit.

Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, has had a lived life, developing “work habits and intellectual commitments that have kept” him “from depression or a sense of irrelevance” (p. 342). No small thing in an academic profession. I recently had the good fortune to attend a Zoom launch of Falk’s memoir, and can personally bear witness to his continued relevance.

During the space of 19 chapters, divided into six parts, and 464 pages Public Intellectual focuses on Falk’s beginnings; time within the academy; his professional life; engaging the world, with special reference to the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the establishment of a Jewish state within Palestine, and his Turkish sojourns; explorations of a citizen pilgrim, while engaging the world intellectually; and the summing up of a citizen pilgrim as a public intellectual — quixotic or prophetic.

After finishing Yale Law School, having already studied four years at the University of Pennsylvania, Falk was given an opportunity to teach law at Ohio State University for one year but ended up staying for six. He then left to visit Princeton for a year, where he ended up staying for 40 years, retiring in 2001. Since 2002, he has been attached to the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, as well as teaching at other universities as a visiting professor, including several in Europe. While writing his memoirs, he accepted a five-year partial appointment at Queen Mary University, London as Chair of Global Law. During this time, Falk distinguished himself as a prominent activist, prolific author and pioneer thinker dedicated to international peace and justice. While at Princeton, Falk was active in seeking an end to the Vietnam War, a better understanding of Iran, and a just solution for Israel/Palestine, apropos of which he served as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. Throughout, Falk built a life of progressive commitment, highlighted by controversial visits to North Vietnam where he met Prime Minister Pham Von Dong; to Iran during the Islamic Revolution after meeting Khomeini in Paris, which he doubtless came to regret; and to South Africa where he met Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid. Many of us who came of age during the Vietnam Era would be familiar with Falk’s travels, which were not for the faint-hearted. It would be hard today to name an American academic activist, with the courage and requisite empathy for ‘the Other’, who would undertake such a journey.

Though I never met Falk, I like his style — his writing style — reminiscent of the unvarnished, working class prose of the Chicago icons of my youth, Studs Terkel and Mike Royko. Falk has withering pen sketches here of some of the leading figures of the American establishment, worth the price of admission. Of Eugene V. Rostow, dean of the Yale Law School and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-1969) under Lyndon B. Johnson:

“Gene Rostow . . . was brilliantly conventional, hackneyed in thought, fluent in expression, trusted by the establishment, and without fail, dressed and deployed

body language as if the managing partner of a leading Wall Street or DC law firm or financial institution. Gene did his best to downplay Yale’s reputation as a place

to train pro bono lawyering and socially deviant thinking and devoted his energy to improving the prospects of Yale students to get the best jobs in Wall Street and

Washington leading firms, or in government” (p.63).

And it’s not just the Rostows in his sights. Falk cuts very close to the bone. He found his mother’s “crassly insensitive materialism” (p.10) embarrassingly distasteful (p. 10), not to mention his “own sense of being essentially unwanted and unloved by her (p.10).” (She later disinherited him.) My favourite is Falk’s putdown of his mother’s second husband, “a greedy gambler of fascist disposition” who asked him to forgo his inheritance as the beneficiary of a trust set up by his rich grandparents for his sister Joan who died in 1973. Falk said, no, subsequently using the money to subsidise his activist and controversial politics.

I bring this up, not to fault Falk’s settling of old scores. Everybody has their own canoe of fools. But because Public intellectual is at once an autobiography, allowing Falk to share the facts of his life, and a memoir, allowing his life experience to point to a larger theme. Or, to put it another way, Falk’s editor appears to be missing in action. Of course, there is always the possibility that Falk ignored the sound advice of his editor and did it his way. What else could explain the re-telling of his youthful brush with the glamorous Zsa Zsa Gabor or an invitation for a major league tryout at the Polo Grounds where the New York Giants played prior to their departure to San Fanscico? The stuff of a young boy’s dreams.

In any case, by Part Four of Public Intellectual, “Engaging the World, Citizenship, Witnessing, Activism,” Falk returns to memoir mode, beginning with the Vietnam War and ending in Palestine, opposing America’s globally militarist approach to the world, while focusing “more on normative considerations, distinguishing right from wrong, just from unjust, legal from illegal (p.181).” The bedrock of Falk’s world view is the “belief that the restraints of international law and UN Charter, properly interpreted, not only served American national interests and should be obeyed for that reason, but were also intrinsically related to humane global governance in the nuclear age, and as such, deserved respect (p.181).” Leaving the privacy of the cloisters of the academy, Falk found himself increasingly confronted with the brighter and sometimes glaring lights of media attention and pubic controversy. What happened next is a cautionary tale to academics who see their country marching to the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, but who do not have the personal courage to resist.

Falk’s final hope is to add the word “humane” to global governance, to assist in evaluating “the quality of order by reference to world order issues, including the minimisation of war, violence, and political repression and the maximisation of ecological responsibility and human rights, including economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, as well as global justice in its many domains (p.417).” This is a tall order. And Falk wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is a review of Richard Falk, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Atlanta GA: Clarity Press, Inc., 2021. 464 pp. ISBN: 9781949762327

Joseph M. Siracusa is President Emeritus of Australia’s Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.